Sex, Marxism and Fraud

Scott Ritter is not the only darling of the Left to get himself into trouble because of his sexual misbehavior. Another is Marc H. Ellis, a tenured professor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and one of the most malicious collaborators in the Campus Wars against the Jews. He openly calls for Israel to be exterminated. He is to be one of the key speakers at the “Annihilate Israel” academic “conference” to be held in a few days at Harvard.

Baylor University’s president is Kenneth Starr, best remembered from his investigations of another sexual predator, Bill Clinton. The current campaign to rid Baylor of Ellis is because Ellis reportedly sexually harassed a female faculty member, who got herself a lawyer and filed a complaint. Evidently all sorts of Baylor faculty knew about it. In response to this, Starr and Baylor have suspended Ellis from all teaching and administrative duties indefinitely. Baylor offered to “buy Ellis out” to get him to leave. Last July the Faculty Dismissal Committee notified Ellis that the administration was seeking his dismissal.

As this world’s largest Baptist University, Baylor officials do not take kindly to professors manhandling the prairie womenfolk. Ellis seems to be defending himself by claiming his suspension is “discriminatory” because others at Baylor have been involved in hanky-panky and have not been similarly punished. In his words, his are “alleged offenses reportedly routine at Baylor.” In other words, if other gropers were coddled, so should he be. Ellis is also claiming there is a dark conspiracy by the tiny local Waco Jewish community to pay Baylor to get him fired.

The radical Left has long adored and celebrated Ellis because he is a radical Jewish anti-Semite in the tradition of Hezbollah agent Norman Finkelstein. The anti-Israel Middle East Studies Associationissued a statement defending and endorsing Ellis, as did the American Association of University Professors. How ridiculous these groups appear now that it is known that Ellis is under fire not because of his anti-Semitism but because of his inability to control his lascivious behavior.

The Reverend Jeremiah Wright loves him. Academic terrorist Edward Said adored him while Said was still alive. George McGovern likes him. Neo-Nazi Norman Finkelstein is the close soul-brother of Ellis, who endorsed Finkelstein’s “book” and who likes to mimic Finkelstein’s smear terminology about the “Holocaust Industry.”

Ellis has no degrees and no academic training at all in Jewish theology, Jewish history, Jewish anything. He holds a PhD degree from a Jesuit University (Marquette), where people may know their Catholic catechism but no one would consider it a serious place to learn about Judaism. Ellis later was employed at the Maryknoll School of Theology in Maryknoll, New York (a liberation theology school that closed in 1994 and was not even accredited). Ellis woke up one fine morning and decided he was an expert in “Jewish Studies.” He peddled himself as such to Baylor, which evidently did not check out his credentials very thoroughly. There he set up the university’s Center for Jewish Studies as his one-man fiefdom. While Baylor should be saluted for wanting to have a Jewish Studies department operating in this Baptist University, hiring Ellis was hardly the way to go about it.

Ellis replaces the traditional Jewish Biblical Patriarchs of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob with Marx, Lenin and Arafat. In Ellis’s writings as a purported “theologian,” there is nothing to indicate he has any familiarity at all with Jewish religious sources or concepts. Indeed, there is no evidence that he has ever read the Bible, let alone studied the Talmud or other classical Jewish texts. Ellis’s “theology” is the same as that of the wacky pro-LSD hippie magazine “Tikkun,” on whose board of editors he sits. Tikkun is published by Michael Lerner, promoter of psychedelic drugs and one-time SDS leader. While Lerner pretends to be a rabbi, he is not and never has been ordained by any rabbinic school. Both Lerner and Ellis like to cite obsessively the “Ethics of the Books of the Prophets in the Bible” as artillery support for their politics, but neither has ever provided any evidence that he has ever read those books or has the slightest idea what they contain.

Steven Plaut is a native Philadelphian who teaches business finance and economics at the University of Haifa in Israel. He holds a PhD in economics from Princeton. He is author of the David Horowitz Freedom Center booklets about the Hamas and Jewish Enablers of the War against Israel.

Judy

You sure he tried to harass a woman and not a goat?

Ken

Probably both!!

Lady_Dr

Better late than never I guess.

tagalog

He publishes in the "Journal of Palestine Studies?" What constitutes Palestine studies?

jimboy

Hating Jews….

kblink45

Why does the author of this article assume that Baylor didn't know what they were getting? Baylor had to review some of the things he'd written. The person or persons who hired this fraud should be held accountable.

jimboy

trying to give baylor benefit of the doubt – out of politeness

flyingtiger

I believe Baylor knew what they were getting. What they did not expect was that he would manhandle the women.
Leftist cannot seem to behave themselves at a university.All DePaul university wanted was a few "Scholorly" articles from him, which he could have easily have a ghostwritier do. He couldn't even do that.

Wingy

What a jerk…in a collection of well known jerks, he stands head and shoulders above the 7 dwarves..

Marty

This article is accurate and somewhat depressing. People such as ellis receive their academic appointments because of a lack of due diligence. Faculty and administrators involved in the national search (assuming there was one) to fill this line are the ones charged with the responsibility to recruit individuals who are professionally credentialed. This is a time consuming but not difficult thing to accomplish. The search committee members ought to be able to explain and justify their recommendation to hire. Until we have at least minimal accountability even outstanding universities such as Baylor will continue to pollute and corrupt the minds of their students with faculty who are frauds, sociopaths, anti-semites, and propagandists.

Questions

Plaut's article is good on one level and bad on another. On the good side, it excoriates Prof. Ellis as a fraud. As a professor of "Jewish studies," Ellis is, shall one say, less than well-equipped. On the bad side, however, Plaut assumes Ellis is guilty as charged. Reality check: A man is entitled to a presumption of innocence. Being on the Left doesn't change this fact. Why should I assume Ellis' female accuser should be taken at face value? The burden of proof remains with the accuser, not the accused. Evidence matters.

For the record, the case against President Clinton as guilty of any criminal behavior was weak at best. It's fitting that Mr. Pious, Kenneth Starr, is the common denominator.

George Peyton

"For the record, the case against President Clinton as guilty of any criminal behavior was weak at best."

Yep, it was so weak that he plead guilty…

Questions

He was forced into it, thanks to prohibitive legal bills. And obviously that was after leaving office; presidential immunity didn't apply.

Maxie

"For the record, the case against President Clinton as guilty of any criminal behavior was weak at best."

What was weak was the GOP will to prosecute Clinton for Filegate & Chinagate – both treasonous offenses. The GOP was so fearful that media blowback would imperil their chances in the upcoming 2000 elections they reined-in Starr and crawled back into thier comfy holes. Baylor may fear a similar fate from the ACLU, ADL, So. Pov. Law Ctr. et al.

Anonymous

It is not at all clear that Marc Ellis is Jewish at all. I don't think he is. I don't believe that his parents were Jewish. Yes, his title at Baylor University is "Professor of Jewish Studies," but his entry on Wikipedia also indicates that he was "a member of the Catholic Workers Movement in 1974-1975." There it is also indicated that he "became a faculty member at the Maryknoll School of Theology in Maryknoll, New York," a not-very-Jewish sort of a position.

From what one can determine, he appears to be the child of American Christians – he grew up in the 1950s, a time when open antisemitism was still a common occurrence in American life – one suspects that he grew up in a home of that kind. Coming of age in the 1960s he likely rebelled against his parents, including the antisemitic environment of his home, perhaps even going through a period of philosemitic curiosity, but certainly infused with "leftist theology." That initial leftist theological philosemitic curiosity gradually morphed into the criticism, and ultimately, full-blown hatred of Israel and hatred of Jews. Ultimately he returned to his origins after all.

One wonders if he enjoys the fact that people, including Jewish people, ASSUME that he is Jewish. If he is masquerading as a Jew, he presumably hopes to deflect claims of antisemitism. What a khazer he is.

Sally

He clearly does not like Jews so is not pretending to be Jewish because of a rebellion against anti-Jewish parents. He is a Jewish anti-Semite who knows nothing about Jews or Judaism. As for him being innocent of groping until proven guilty, while he was not stood up in front of a court for it, which would be unusual in academia in any case, the Baylor authorities conducted a thorough investigation and he certainly was found guilty via these procedures.

Insecticide

Ellis is being promoted this month by British Holocaust Denier Paul Eisen . Do we need any further proof that Ellis is a fraud and anti-Semite?